For example, while people focus on Tribune Co.’s latest decision to cut staff at the Los Angeles Times, they don’t see that there are 85 interactive job openings at Tribune.

“Most people sit there and bemoan the sorry state of traditional media companies and notice how positions are being cut,” said Laurel Touby, founder of mediabistro.com.

“But there’s another side of the trend. They might be cutting print jobs, but they’re also adding digital positions, and they’re having a hard time finding those people because — guess what? — no one has those skills.”

This is the key issue. Whereas print jobs are being cut, the pool of digitally knowledgeable journalists is actually limited, and traditional media don’t consistently invest in retraining their current staff.

“It’s a hard sell because media companies have traditionally not invested in people, they don’t invest in management training programs,” said Touby.

Yet many organizations are in fact “shifting” – simply assigning new duties rather than training - their print staffers to converge with online operations.

So in effect, though it may seem hard to believe, the size of newsrooms isn’t shrinking.

“In real terms, reporting and editing resources that were once devoted exclusively to producing the paper have been shifted selectively to combined print and online production — while the dedicated online staff has remained constant,” said Kinsey Wilson, executive editor of USA Today.

The progressive shift toward digital obviously profits young multimedia journalists. “Rather than complain about the job cuts at media organizations, J-school graduates are actually finding themselves in plum positions if they have digital skills out of college,” said Mediashift.

Source: Mediashift